HWBOT Articles

Today we are enormously pleased to announce the launch of the eagerly anticipated Team Cup 2015 on OC-ESPORTS, a contest that pits dozens of teams of overclockers against each other with a total of thirty stages based across virtually every hardware category imaginable.

The Team Cup 2015 is the ultimate team-oriented overclocking contest, requiring the broadest possible collection of hardware platforms and skill sets - from socket 775 and AGP slot GPUs, to Raspberry Pi and ARM processors, the Team Cup must surely be the truest test of OC teamwork.

Last year’s Team Cup was a roaring success, drawing in a massive total of 89 overclocking teams,and we are confident this year’s edition will again prove to be popular. The eventual 2014 winners were HwBox Hellas O/C Team from Greece who thrashed the competition with a total score of 1,268 points, beating 2nd place finishers XTREME OC Team Bulgaria who amassed 1,026 points. Judging by last year’s performance other hopefuls this year will include Classicplatforms.com and Overclockers.com, both largely US based, plus several other big hitters from Germany, Sweden and elsewhere.

Last week we already extensively covered the interesting overclocking results from 0.0 who overclocked a locked mobile Haswell CPU to achieve a Global First Place in the XTU dual core category. This week we listen to the man himself, Alex, who was kind enough to take the time for an interview.

"... Having the BCLK run at 99.8MHz instead of a nice round 100MHz just doesn't look proper and there is no center spread spectrum to adjust it. The next problem was power throttling. As the CPU relies on a slope value for current, it's easy enough to trick the CPU into thinking it's using less power than it really is and prevent power throttling. However that is not an ideal solution, I don't really want to stress the battery. Power limiting in laptops is ultimately driven by the embedded controller (EC) firmware, so instead I modified that to give control back to the MSR while on AC power ..."

0.0 from Thailand has pushed the dual core Global First Place to over 600 points using his Core i7 4600M mobile Haswell processor. Even though this processor is not unlocked by default, a bug in an early microcode allows for ratio overclocking just like on the K-sku processor series.

There is no doubt that one of the great things about being in Taipei for Computex is the chance to get involved with some truly world-class overclocking. This year’s Computex probably attracted as much in the way of OC talent that has ever been assembled in one place. Big hitters like World No.1 8 Pack and others including der8auer, Vivi, Xtreme_Addict and Dancop to name just a few, were enjoying the island of Formosa, thanks to sponsorships and partnerships with local vendors, many of whom also hosted overclocking events and competitions throughout the week.

The real highlight from an overclocking perspective was doubtlessly the HWBOT World Tour event which kicked off during the days immediately after the show. The World Tour event was hosted at the Taipei Maker Bar located right in the heart of the city, just a few minutes’ walk from the local computer market. The event ran continuously (24 hours around the clock) for three days and was backed by a host of sponsors including ASUS, ROG, HyperX, Seasonic, Dimastech and OverclockingTV.

If you joined HWBOT between three months and one year to date, you fall in the Novice category of overclockers at HWBOT. That means you already have a bit of experience from the Rookie Rumble and are looking for your next challenge in overclocking. The Novice Nimble competition series is set up specifically for this group of people and with this guide we want to help you participate in the Novice Nimble.

Two days ago, that's exactly what happened. If you were impressed by Rbuass, Dancop, and Der8auer's recent record spree, check out K|ngp|n's stuff. Where Dancop and Rbuass are the only two over 12,000 points only two over 12,300 points (Steponz was the first to breach the 12K mark) with a single GPU graphics card in 3DMark Fire Strike Extreme, K|ngp|n is ... over 13,000. Yes, you read that right: over thirteen thousand points!

Using a Core i7 5960X Haswell-E CPU at 5.5GHz and his GTX 980 Ti graphics card at near 2.1GHz on both GPU and memory, the score of 13091 is one for the history books.

We look forward to finding out what others will accomplish with the KPE card in the next coming weeks.

In a thread posted on our forums and sourced at ByteMeDev.com, RagingCain investigated the effect of Nvidia's driver releases on the performance as measured with 3DMark Fire Strike and Fire Strike Extreme. In total 18 drivers were tested with the GeForce GTX 780 Ti in both single GPU and SLI configuration.

In the conclusive lines RagingCain states: "The transitioning into 35x.xx family has caused a certain amount of performance penalty to some Kepler users, for example a loss of 4.05% in GPU score in Fire Strike, and 3.88% Fire Strike Extreme. A loss though should be read in context. The loss in performance since at least driver 347.25. I don't think there is a huge conspiracy to "withhold" performance as people speculate, but there is enough data to merit a review by nVidia. I don't expect major performance gains any more, now that we are EOL, but we shouldn't be going down in performance in a benchmark that even pre-dates this video card. The best driver currently for Kepler, in terms of 3DMark performance I have tested thus far is 347.25. If you must use a 35x.xx driver, I highly recommend the 350.12 or the 352.86. I have updated the charts and added the actual numbers."

Since it's hard to write a compelling news article about TechPowerUp's latest GPU-Z release, we'll just stick to the bare facts. It's version and it supports Windows 10. Oh, and also GPU voltage monitoring support for AMD's Fury X "Fiji" architecture. And also the other things listed below:

The next round of the Old School is Best School contest on OC-ESPORTS is almost upon us. Running from August 1st to September 30th, the contest offers old timers a chance to revisit and benchmark classic hardware platforms of the past. For younger overclockers it’s a chance to explore pretty ancient hardware and gain a better historical perspective.

Old School is Best School Round 5 involves hardware that originates from almost twenty years ago with early Intel platforms that peak at 100MHz CPU clocks, and graphics chip technology from an influential company that pre-dates Nvidia and ATi. Let’s take a look at each of the stages in more detail.

In a press release issued today, G.SKILL announces the first retail memory kit to break through the DDR4-4000 barrier and two brand new memory series – the Trident Z and Ripjaws V series – with updated performance specifications designed for the latest 6th generation Intel Core Skylake Processors and Z170 motherboards!

The new Trident Z DDR4 memory is the successor to the high-end Trident memory series and making its debut on the latest DDR4 standard, designed and tested for the next generation Skylake-S platform! For the first time in the history of extreme memory kits, Trident Z is entering the arena with a DDR4-4000, built with highest-end Samsung IC memory chips and validated on the ASRock Z170 OC Formula motherboard.

With a new generation, comes a new heat spreader design concept. Game in style; work in style. Ripjaws V is the newest member of the classic performance Ripjaws family, featuring suave new looks in five illuminating colors: Blazing Red, Steel Blue, Radiant Silver, Gunmetal Gray, and Classic Black.

And ashamed we are, because this is quite amazing news. For the first time ever (as far as my memory goes back), an HWBOT Overclocking World Record was broken by an Indian overclocker! Toolius achieved this feat by beating established Filipino top-overclocker Dhenzjhen in Geekbench3 using 2 Intel Xeon E5 2699 V3 processors at 2883MHz. He uses the ASUS Z10PE-D8 WS motherboard, hence why it's covered on the ROG blog.

The Geekbench3 benchmark is a recent addition to the HWBoints suite and now features World Record, Global, and Hardware Points for participants. Toolius' score yields him a total of 114.1 points. Pretty sweet!

Linking back to benchlife.info as the original source of the screenshot that led to the news article, WCCFTech is reporting that overclocking might be back on "locked" processors with Skylake.

Based on the screenshot linked to this article which shows a Core i7 6400T ES Q0 revision overclocked to 133 MHz base clock frequency up from a default of 100 MHz, it appears that this rumour might be true.

Truth be told,this rumor has been floating within the inner circle of the (overclocking) industry for months, but last week it was explicitly stated that this feature was no longer supported. The main reason why it could be possible is because the Skylake platform has an external clock generator, unlike Haswell, Ivy Bridge, or Sandy Bridge. The last platform to have an external clock generator was Nehalem. But bear in mind that Intel's strategy for overclocking has been to explicitly limit it to the K- and X-SKU processors since Sandy Bridge.

Important to note is that the leaked CPU-Z validations at 5.2 GHz and 6.5 GHz are both with R0 stepping. The screenshot of the overclocked "locked" Core i7 6400T is with a Q0 stepping processor.

To summarize: this rumor existed for a long time, but was very recently denied. The screenshot shows an older revision of the Skylake silicon as Q0 transitioned into R0. The ability to overclock "locked" processors would certainly be an interesting development for overclocking and its community. Moving closer to the launch of Skylake rumored (meh, confirmed!) next week, we are very interested in finding out the truth behind this story.

The Kingpincooling forum is the home of EVGA's in-house overclockers and all-round performance enthusiasts TiN and K|ngp|n. On the forums you can find pretty much anything you need for overclocking EVGA hardware. On special occasions you'll find so-called "super-guides" or "uncorking guides" which tell you everything you need to know about pushing a particular piece of hardware.

The Uncorking guide for the EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti KPE published yesterday is probably the best overclocking guide published on this generation's GeForce graphics cards. It has everything! Do you want to know how to overclocking on air? It's there. Are you maybe interested in BIOS and tools for extreme overclocking? Yup, it's there. Do you need specifics on LN2 scaling? YES, it's there. Do you want to use your Raspberry Pi for voltage control? YES IT'S THERE!

The article is a piece of art and a must-read for everyone overclocking the GeForce GTX 980 Ti, even if it's not an EVGA K|ngp|n Edition card. Hopefully we can see other vendors produce similar community supporting guides for overclocking, and even if it's only half as good as this one it would be fantastic in our eyes.

Since the launch of the Fury X last month there's been a lot of speculation on the overclocking capabilities of the new GPU. The speculation was mainly instigated by AMD, stating their Fury X has "a lot of overclocking headroom" thanks to the AIO water cooling and power input. In reality however, the GPU core frequency could only be overclocked about 100MHz (+10%) using default cooling and voltage and the memory overclocking was even more limited as AMD didn't provide tools out of the box to overclock.

With a voltage bump of +144 mV (1.35V), the card scales up to about 1215 MHz, an increase of about 20%. The performance in Battlefield 3 jumps from an average of about 53.5 FPS to 55 FPS. Beyond +144 mV the card throttles and requires better cooling for stable overclocking. At the same elevated GPU frequency of 1215 MHz, W1zard also tests the impact of memory overclocking. Testing 560 MHz up from a default 500 MHz (+ 12%), the FPS increases further from 55 FPS to about 56.5 FPS.

Overall, the performance after overclocking increased by about 6% when overclocking the GPU and memory to 1215/560 up from 1050/500 MHz. The bad new is that the (full system) power draw increases by a whopping 27% (or 150W) when overclocking. The temperature increases a mere 67°C to 71°C, proving the solid cooling solution AMD is so proud of.

The last time we checked the progress on the translations was two months ago. In the end of May, we reported about progress on Italian, Hungarian, and Romanian language.

Today we update you once more. We want to highlight Spanish moving close to the 100% mark. Also we see good improvement for Portuguese / Brazilian (+20%), Norwegian (+50%), and Ukrainian (+35%).

Note that every overclocker participating in the translation project automatically becomes the owner of the HWBOT Project Contributor and HWBOT Translator achievements. We are humbled by the efforts of the overclocking community to make HWBOT more accessible and more available for the international community. Thank you very much!